Is SEO Friendly CMS Possible?

Posted on | August 15, 2007 | Comments Off

Although Content Management Systems (CMS) have some great benefits there are certain things to look at from the SEO perspective before implementing one. If your CMS doesn’t generate search engine friendly, as well as user-friendly, web pages, then you stand a chance of losing all of the natural, or organic, search traffic you’ve already built up.

Often when a CMS claims to be search engine friendly they simply mean a programmer can modify the system with add-ons that don’t affect the search engine results as much. These add-ons are not 100% effective though and can still impact your natural results.

A major concern is finding a CMS that creates search engine friendly URLs. Even if you do find a CMS that generates these you still need to be cautious. Don’t forget these URLs need to be people friendly, too. A good CMS will allow website owners to create URL structures that make sense to both the search engine spiders and their target audiences.

Another problem with CMSs is their inability to work with both graphic image and text links. An effective website needs to balance CSS formatted text and graphic images. Many CMSs focus too much on text links, invariably making every link a text link. While text link navigation is necessary, be sure to determine when it is and isn’t appropriate to use before settling on a CMS.

Additionally, many CMS companies don’t have SEO experts on staff. Therefore, they don’t generate the most user-friendly templates. In a strange twist, CMS staff now often create templates with search engines in mind rather than end users. The result is they don’t think about important aspects such as: What do each of the pages, category or product, look like? What are the up-sell links? What does the reference page contain? Or any other question pertinent to your site. Try to find a company that will integrate your current, successful webpage templates into their CMS for the best outcome.

If your employees using the CMS are able to optimize content as it’s created this will enhance your ability to obtain better search engine ratings. This means your CMS should allow users to easily create keyword rich URLs, title tags, descriptions and image alt text. The CMS should also provide feedback on these parts as to how they will impact the page’s performance for the selected keywords. This will save time because your CMS users will be able to create and optimize content in one tool, rather than switching between a CMS and their SEO tools.

Some specific problems that CMS generated content has seen in being indexed by search engines include dynamic URLs, bad meta tags, keyword poor URLs and time consumption. Search engines limit the number of dynamic pages they will index and they determine that a page is dynamic if it uses special characters (%&+.) Meta tags tell the search engines what kind of data is on a page. Many CMS systems do not assign unique data to different pages, which is a big no-no to search engines. Keyword rich URLs are a very important step to optimizing your pages to rank well and you alone know what keywords you are trying to rank for. Finally, most CMS systems are time consuming and repetitive. Users have different tools for creating content and then analyzing it. Often SEO tools can’t optimize a page unless it’s published so anything sitting in your CMS cannot be evaluated until it’s put on the web.

The simple truth is SEO must always be at the top of your list when planning a website redesign and search engine optimization is easiest when you have direct access to the source code. Keep that in mind when considering any CMS tool and your purchase will be significantly improved.

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